Jul 14, 2024

My Femboy Roommate: Frequently Asked Questions

Community Announcements - Nuteku

Hey everyone, I'm Nuteku!

I'm the developer for My Femboy Roommate! Thank you for taking the time to show your interest in the game, I'm working hard to make this game the best it can before release! I'm here to hopefully provide some much needed answers to some frequently asked questions.

When is the full-game coming?

The current release date I've decided upon, at least for the time being if all goes to plan, is October 22nd, 2024. This was chosen as it lines up to the end of the Steam October NextFest, where My Femboy Roommate will be featured. It also gives me enough time to complete the game and polish it, ensuring enough content to justify your guys hard-earned cash!

Will there be a demo?

Yes, I'll try to release a demo by the end of this month (July 2024). I'll have a similar announcement like this when the demo is released, so you guys won't miss it! I hope to have enough content in the demo to hook you guys and let you fall in love with Robin, your new femboy roommate!

How much content will there be?

So with the current state of the game, I can't give a definite answer as to how much content there will be. Since it is a visual novel, it is largely dependent on how fast you read and go through the game. Whether you take the time to read and enjoy the dialogue (which is planned to be voiced) or rush through the game is your choice.

Assuming you read at an average pace, it'll take you 1-2 hours to get through a playthrough of the game. There are 3 endings planned, so there is an aspect of replayability there too.

If you have any other questions, feel free to drop them under this post or on our community page! Thank you so much for supporting the game, and if you haven't already, please wishlist the game.

Jul 14, 2024

Future Milestones

Sauna of the DEAD - 温野菜

Are you enjoying Sauna of the DEAD?

I have significantly changed the game balance for Sauna: Endless Summer and transitioned to a new ranking system. Please give it a try.

Now, let me inform you about what I am currently working on. I am developing a new game mode where you will restore a dilapidated sauna that has turned into a dungeon.

Here are the rules I have so far:

・Start at level 1 with no items.
・Collect items needed for sauna restoration and place them in the correct locations.
・The evaluation of the sauna restoration is based on how many necessary items you can place within the limitations.

Please look forward to the new game mode.
In the meantime, enjoy the newly balanced Endless Summer.

Thank you for your continued support of Sauna of the DEAD.

Jul 14, 2024

Hotfix 1.01g

Zero Division - Robot Cat Games

Hotfix 1.01g
14 July 2024

Bug Fixes

- Fixed an issue with Jinn's Siege Stance talent which prevented it from being loaded properly at start of combat.
- Fixed the card text on replicated versions of Ordinal Slice, which incorrectly referred to a damage value of 2 (correct value is 3).
- Amended the mod text and keyword text for the Delusional effect to make the effect description clearer. (Delusional is a debuff which appears on the Headcase augment and in the Malevolence Code Sentries, and causes affected units' stats to appear as 99/99/99 even though their true values may differ.)
- Fixed the mode description for Unlimited, which erroneously referred to new players despite being unlocked fairly late.

Balance Changes

- The cost of buying Supply at Quorum Brokers has been reduced to 250 Gleam.

Notes: Who can afford to pay 500 in this economy?

Jul 14, 2024

DevLog 1

Mega Giga Cookie Destroyer TD - Lan Game Studio

Hello fellow Cookie Destroyers,

In this developer log, I want to talk about the lighting for Mega Giga Cookie Destroyer TD. This means we will get deeply technical in this log.

I implemented a ray marched lighting system with a GPU-based precomputed distance field.

Introduction

In the world of 2D lighting, there are basically just three components to consider: the light source, the occluders, and the unlit image we get from the rendering. This means our approach is a post-processing effect applied on top of the rendered image.

Using Rays for lighting

We want to display lighting realistically. This means light should respect occluders and show sharp rays on the edges.

To achieve this, we use a form of ray tracing that allows us to simulate the light. In a brute force approach, we could just go from each pixel to the next pixel and check if we found an occluder. This would involve a lot of computation, as each pixel would need to be checked on each ray. There is a ray for each light in the scene to each pixel on the screen. You see how this escalates into burning GPUs very quickly.

PS: No GPU has been harmed during the development of Mega Giga Cookie Destroyer TD

To reduce the number of checks we have to do, we can use signed distance functions to calculate a distance field of our scene. With a signed distance function, we can get the distance from the current pixel to the nearest occluder. This means we can move at least this amount along our ray.

Pre computed distance field

A distance field is a one-channel texture that holds, for every pixel, the distance to the nearest occluder. This is essential information we can use to move along rays in a lightning-fast way.

To generate a distance field, we need to build the signed distance function from our scene. This sounds complex, but in Mega Giga Cookie Destroyer TD, we mostly need rectangle and circle occluders.

If you really want to see the math behind this, take a look here: Signed Distance Functions. We can combine distances to different shapes by simply taking the minimum of the distance to each shape.

Now we use a shader (a program that runs on the GPU) to build our distance field with a lot of math and move that to the actual ray marching lighting shader.

Lighting

Calculating light in 2D is actually pretty easy if we forget about the occluders for a second. We have a point somewhere in our scene. This point gets a color and a strength value. We can use the distance between the current pixel and that point to decide how much of an effect this light has. The farther away the light, the lesser the effect it has.

Now we just add the ray marching into the mix. We check with a ray if there is something between our current pixel and each light in the scene. If there is nothing, we color the current pixel with the light. If there is something in the way, we leave the pixel untouched. And that is about it.

Conclusion

Does a 2D tower defense game need fancy lighting? I hope so. Eye candy is a big value for these kinds of games, though I have to admit, it is very tempting to turn this up to 11. :)

Stay tuned for more updates, and thank you for joining us on this technical journey through the lighting system of Mega Giga Cookie Destroyer TD. We hope you enjoy the visual improvements as much as we enjoyed creating them!

PS: This approach does not need some fancy ray tracing hardware ;)
PSS: If you want to know more about ray marching, you can ask me questions on the Discord